Dahs: "Hey, boss, I can't afford car insurance. Can I get a raise?"
Me: "Dahs, you flip burgers 28 hours per week. The going rate is $8 an hour. Hardee's only pays $7.50."
D: "Yeah but I can't afford car insurance."
Me: "Let's take a look at your finances. Maybe we can cut some expenditures out so you can get car insurance."
D: "**** you. I like to smoke and drink. You can't tell me how to live my life!"

Posted by dahsdebater on 11/9/2012 9:35:00 AM (view original):You're the only retarded one here. Bistiza is ridiculously idealistic and can't work within real-world parameters. You're just stupid.

Tell me what to think of the McDonald's franchise owner who does the best he can for himself and his family by paying his workers a wage at which they can barely afford car insurance while pocketing half a million a year in profits. Obviously some of the examples I provided are extreme, but there are perfectly legal ways to do well for yourself and your family by abusing other people. Hell, outsourcing your factory to China and paying people $2 an hour or less for 10 or 12 hour work days is legal. Does that make it right? Do you applaud the guy that outsources jobs to make bigger profits?

Yeah, your McDonald's example is pretty stupid. As Mike said, nobody is forcing anybody to work at McDonalds for minimum wage if they have the means and opportunity to work somewhere else for a higher wage. Employers will pay the rate that the market demands. They are under no legal or moral obligation to pay more than that.

Which seems to be the disconnect in bistiza's socialist philosophy and most everybody else . . . . one can infer from his posts that he seems to feel that there is a fundamental sense of morality that is somehow being violated in a capitalist economic system. Morality is almost always a subjective thing. Most people are not going to agree with his condemnation of capitalism as being fundamentally immoral unless their names are Marx or Lenin.

Also, FWIW, I blocked biz at 9:04 because I can't read any more, even in single sentence form, of his dumbassery.

Now he's MikeT23 has the ultimate triangle of ignorance going on: Childish insults, telling others what to think, and the classic "I'm ignoring you so I don't actually have to try to defend my position".

His ability to make me laugh transcends well beyond his reading of my posts and actually responding.

It is the individual's job to get paid as much as he feels he's worth. If business A won't pay him, go to business B. If business B won't do it, go to business C. If business C-Z won't do it, maybe the individual should re-evaluate his worth.

Except the market is held down artificially by the stagnant economy (and by laws and regulations, but I won't get into that now). To put it in layman's terms, while most jobs should pay more than they do, employers can get away with offering less across the board of wages and benefits because of the high number of job seekers and low number of jobs. In a better economic situation (and with better economic policies) there would be a lot more quality jobs (and jobs in general) to go around, which would force employers to pay better wages and offer better benefits if they wanted to attract better (more educated, more experienced, or whatever) employees. Otherwise, as you point out, better employees can and do look elsewhere for work. Unfortunately they are very limited in the ability to do that by conditions I've already described, so it's not a realistic situation right now for the most part.

As a business owner, it's no my job to make sure you can afford car insurance. That's your responsibility.

Another self serving statement, but not a surprise considering the source.

Sure, people are responsible for their earning to an extent, but businesses need to be held more accountable for how they treat employees, who are a valuable resource. Sometimes paying a little more for something increases the quality by a margin much greater than the cost, and the same is true of human resources - sometimes paying a bit more in salary or benefits gets better employees and makes existing employees work harder and better and provides for better morale. It's not as black and white as you seem to think.

Employers will pay the rate that the market demands. They are under no legal or moral obligation to pay more than that.

Unfortunately for many people, this is absolutely true.

You are paid based upon what the market says your PERCEIVED combination of job skills is worth for the particular job or career you are in. The more valuable and rare your skills are perceived to be (and may or may not actually be), the more you are paid, and vice versa. To give an extreme example of how this works, no one is arguably a better NBA player than LeBron James. Since he is the only one who possesses his skills (or if you say others are as good, since he is one of a rare few who possess those skills) he makes a lot of money since those skills are in demand (by NBA teams). Conversely, someone who "flips burgers" at McDonald's is performing a skill which employers probably believe (and perhaps rightly so) could be performed by any number of people who are also willing to do the job (because of a variety of reasons) so they get paid minimum wage (or close to it) in most cases.

one can infer from his posts that he seems to feel that there is a fundamental sense of morality that is somehow being violated in a capitalist economic system.

It's not a matter of morals so much as a matter of logic.

When the vast majority of people are held down by an economic structure (capitalism) so that a small minority may benefit, there may well be moral implications, but sheer logic dictates the majority should not be happy with that situation and should probably rise up and demand it be changed.

This is why the group in power (the wealthy) perpetuate the half-truth of "if you just work harder, you can rise up and be rich like me" to keep the masses in check with the largely false hope they too can become one of the elite who have lots of money and take advantage of everyone else.

They also use their wealth to create a system of power that makes it all but certain the masses cannot rise up and demand change by doing everything from making sure like-minded people get elected to make decision in their favor to promoting propaganda to the masses to make them second guess an overturn of the system that holds them down.

Most people are not going to agree with his condemnation of capitalism as being fundamentally immoral unless their names are Marx or Lenin.

Actually there are a great deal of people who share many of my beliefs. Some of them don't express these beliefs for fear of reprisal by those in favor of the current system. Some do. They include educated people such as myself as well as a large group of people who simply understand the current system doesn't benefit them. You can easily see the level of understanding of this by the relatively recent protests who declared "we are the 99%" and other such mantras which show they recognize the truth that capitalism is set up to benefit a small minority at the expense of the vast majority.

Whether you read what anyone has to say is entirely up to you. However if you're going to ignore everyone who doesn't agree with you, maybe message boards aren't your thing and you'd be better off not reading anyone at all so you never have to deal with anyone disagreeing with your opinion.

I'm guessing that many of the people who particpated in the various Occupy camps around the country last year had no freakin' clue about what they were doing beyond camping out and holding signs with slogans. They were caught up on being a part of something with a bunch of other like-minded individuals (who likewise were clueless about why they were there).

I'm guessing that many of the people who particpated in the various Occupy camps around the country last year had no freakin' clue about what they were doing beyond camping out and holding signs with slogans. They were caught up on being a part of something with a bunch of other like-minded individuals (who likewise were clueless about why they were there).

I'm guessing that many of the people who particpated in the various Occupy camps around the country last year had no freakin' clue about what they were doing beyond camping out and holding signs with slogans. They were caught up on being a part of something with a bunch of other like-minded individuals (who likewise were clueless about why they were there).

The same goes for the Tea Party.

The Tea Party is not quite that clueless, but they are misguided in their own way.

A couple of months ago I had a discussion with a friend who is a huge Tea Party supporter. I expressed my opinion that the Tea Party has hijacked the Republican Party to the detriment of both. He pointed me to a Tea Party web site and asked me to read their mission statement. I humored him and did so. I found the written mission statement of the Tea Party to come across as reasonable, and I agreed with many of the principles that it contained. The reality, however, is that the Tea Party's mission statement on paper is different from the Tea Party in practice, because the Tea Party itself has been somewhat hijacked by the religious right. Which is why they tend to come off as complete kooks.

The irony about the Occupy movement and why it failed is that it should have looked to the Tea Party as a model for how to organize politically and affect change. But the "leaders" of the Occupy movement refused to do so because they didn't want to give the appearance of becoming part of the very establishment that they were challenging. And that's why Occupy crashed and burned..

Eh, I think both movements were trendy and emotional and were able to captivate people who really had no idea what they were talking about. My father is a huge tea party supporter and it really gets embarrassing when he starts talking politics. Everything is viewed as black and white and once you get past the talking points there is really no substance.

The 99% rallies/movement was incredibly misguided and a huge waste of time, energy, and resources. I'm sure you're a smart enough guy to realize that...The only people it impacted were members of the "99%."

Absolutely it was misguided and a waste of time, energy, and resources.

HOWEVER, it did show that there are some people out there who actually understand the modern American capitalist machine isn't doing them any favors, and that's a step in the right direction.

I think it showed a lot of 60's hippie wannabes who wanted to post "Look at me, I'm protesting something!" pictures of themselves holding signs with slogans on Twitter and Facebook with their iPhones and Androids.